The Days When We Were Young
by Nylah
Summary: When fifteen year old Rick Castle took off to visit a concert with some dubious friends, he was in over his head. And over twenty years later, the memories of what took place still haunt him. Tag for 'Vampire Weekend'


A/N: Why on earth did I write a Castle story? Why? Why? It's completely random. In fact, that was the working title, 'random castle story'. I'm sorry. It got slightly longer than I anticipated, thought I might as well post it.

Tag for "Vampire Weekend".

Disclaimer: I do not own Castle or Nikki Heat and do not, in any way, profit from the story. All creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).

* * *

THE DAYS WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

* * *

Hah! Trauma! He got her there. A sob story about finding a dead body on the beach. He totally had her. Maybe he did inherit some of his mother's acting talent after all. Oh, yes, he must have, because hadn't he been acting almost all his life? Hadn't the carefree, self-assured, immature mask been in place since...

_...The alley was dark, darker than he'd expected it to be. Dark and damp. And smelly, definitely smelly, something rotting. Trash cans, overflowing. Some soggy cardboard boxes... with a shoe sticking out from under it, only just visible in the scant light from the lantern at the end of the alley. Some bum, trying – and failing – to take shelter from the incessant rain?_

_He shivered and looked up at the fire escape. If he jumped, he might be able to reach it and pull himself up... yeah, right. Mr athletic. No way he would be able to get up there again. He swallowed, and looked at the light at the end of the alley. There was no way back now. He was on his own. _

Once out of sight, Rick's smug smile fell from his face. Mouth set in an uncharacteristic grim line, he stalked towards the elevator, pressed the button and waited for the elevator to show – really, was it just him or did these things get slower every day? Impatiently, he pressed the button again while glancing up and down the hallway to see if there was anybody he knew, but it was mostly empty. Some people getting coffee from the pantry at the other end of the hallway, a secretary, waving at him from too great a distance to properly see the expression on his face. He waved back. Good. He was in no mood for smiles and jokes and being his usual charming self. And the other Rick, the Rick nobody ever saw, he liked to keep him well hidden from the public eye.

_For the umpteenth time, he pulled up his backpack on his sore shoulder. The rain was really getting to him now, dripping from his hair into his neck. His feet splashed in the puddles on the street, puddles he had stopped avoiding after a car had splashed water on him in passing, soaking him. He was regretting declining their offer to pick him up now, regretting his bravado that he'd walk the distance, no problem. And most of all, he was regretting his decision to come._

He was the only occupant of the elevator down, for which he was thankful. For once, things seemed to be going his way. Not that he wasn't used to things going his way or, if they weren't, he'd make them go his way, but it was nice anyway. Piece and quiet. People leaving him alone. Time to regain his composure. Time to see his daughter, his wonderful, amazing, so unlike him and his mother daughter. His daughter who had turned fifteen this year, the same age he had been when...

_The door of the van slid open and he climbed inside. Dropping his backpack on the floor he sat down in the only available seat, turned and closed the door with a bang. Then he sank back, blinking the raindrops from his eyelashes._

"_Ricky Castle!" the driver said, his arm on the back of his seat and half turning to look at him, "Nice of you to join us. Finally."_

"_Yeah, Ricky, what kept you?" Lana asked from the back. She was somehow taking up the entire back seat on her own, sprawled out on it and smiling hazily at him, and he suspected she was already doped. He put on a cocky smile on his face._

"_You know my mom," he said, "Couldn't get away from her until now."_

"_Awwww," Chris, sitting in the front next to Tom, the driver, said. _

_Rick turned to him and scowled. "If we're gonna do this, we have to be well away before they miss us. I couldn't very well walk out of a rehearsal. I had to wait until she..." Passed out from the booze. "...was done."_

"_Nobody misses me," Tom said from the front._

"_Yeah well not many of us live on our own," Rick said, turning to the driver again. Annoyed by his friends' interrogation, he slumped down in his seat and crossed his arms. "Can we just get going or do you need to interrogate me on my insane mother some more? Because if you do, can you pass me something to drink? We'll be here a while."_

_Inwardly, he winced at his accurate but way too open description of his mother. They knew who she was, of course, everybody knew who she was, but not many people really _knew_ her. Not like he did, anyway. Fortunately, his friends seemed to have missed his slip. Tom turned around and started the car. Next to him Alex, who had remained quiet, handed him a beer. As the van pulled away, Rick stared out of the window, looking at the city lights reflecting a thousand times in the raindrops sliding down the glass. He would be in so much trouble. Again._

When he opened the door to his home, his mother's voice floated towards him, reciting something or other from a play she once did, and he stood a moment to listen to her voice. It was deeper than it used to be, caused by too much drinking and too much smoking. Sure, she had given up smoking years ago, but somehow he always remembered her with a cigarette in her hand.

"_Smoke?" Lana asked, holding out the burning cigarette to him. Rick silently took it from her, but hesitated before taking a draw. "What's in it?" he asked._

_Lana just smiled. He looked at the glowing tip of it. Probably a bad idea. Which was a perfect reason for doing it. Still, he hesitated. Did he really want to go there? On the other hand, did he want to miss out on a chance to try something new? Bending over the back of his seat, he handed Lana the cigarette back._

"_No thanks," he said, "I want to be able to remember the concert."_

Would Alexis ever do drugs? After softly closing the door behind him, he stepped into the room. His mother came into view, sitting across from Alexis. His daughter had that interested expression plastered on her face whenever she was listening to one of his mother's stories, stories she had told them over and over again, from the good old days, from the days when she was young, and later not so young, form the days he himself was young...

_Lana giggled the whole way out of town. Alex handed him his second beer, and Rick started to relax. Everything was going smoothly, his clothes were drying because Tom had turned up the heat, and the night closed around them like a blanket, encapsulating them, isolating them in their little bubble on the road. He glanced down at his backpack, feeling a story brewing in the back of his mind, but it would be too dark to write in the notebook stuffed somewhere in it. He thought about his mother._

_Would she be worried now? He'd be missing for two whole days. Would she even notice he was gone?_

_Squashing the sudden pain he sat up straighter and leaned forward to look out of the windshield._

"_Hey," he asked, "Where are we going?"_

"Hello mother," he said, walking up to the women in his life, "Alexis." He flopped down on the couch. "And how are my two favorite girls doing today?"

Alexis smiled while trying to send him desperate messages with her eyes – save me! – which he casually ignored. Feeling better by the minute, he smiled back. She never failed to make him feel better, she never failed to be the center of his life, the focus of his attention since the day she was born. He remembered the strange pink bundle all too well, remembered looking into the crumbled face of that tiny person that was part of him, and from that moment on he had known that whatever happened, all the ups and downs in his life had been canceled out by her being in his life.

"Oh darling, it's so good you're home," Martha said, "I was just telling Alexis about this play I'm going to audition for, which is actually a modern interpretation of Hamlet... Yes, another one, and that I've done this play before but I can't remember... Was that in nineteen eighty five or nineteen eighty four?"

Rick took the crumbled stack of papers from her hands and glanced at the lines. For some reason, he wasn't surprised. Irony. Coincidence. Or the gods playing tricks on him... now that he thought about it, he liked the latter. After all, he was well worth playing tricks on.

Handing the papers back while carefully keeping his mask in place, he shrugged. "Nineteen eighty six."

_The van pulled up next to a dark warehouse, right at the edge of town. Rick could see an empty stretch of land behind it. The parking lot was only partially lighted by orange street lights, and they were at the dark end of it. Tom killed the engine, and all went quiet. For a few moments, the only sounds in the van were their breathing and Lana's muffled giggles. Then Tom opened the door and jumped out. Alex leaned over Rick and opened the side door of the van, then climbed over him and jumped on the wet tarmac._

_At least it had stopped raining. Slowly, Rick followed, having a pretty good idea just what they were doing there, and not liking it one bit. Hanging with the wrong crowd, the head master had told his mother. She had laughed about it and had waved her hand, saying her Rick could take care of himself just fine, there was no need to expel him – again – as he was behaving himself in school. More or less. No worse than any of the other trouble makers, anyway._

_He had stood there, just outside the door, listening. One part of him was smiling smugly, knowing he wouldn't be punished, the other part of him, the part he didn't like because it always whispered hateful things to him, said: "I told you so. She doesn't care."_

"Really?" Martha said. She looked down at her papers. "Oh."

Alexis, obviously glad for the distraction her father provided, scooted closer to him, put her hands on his arm and tilted her head. "Dad?"

Rick leaned back and let himself relax in the couch. His favorite couch. He blinked at his favorite daughter. "Hmm?"

"Can I go to the Blue Pill concert with Leanne?"

He opened his mouth and then closed it again. His first, instinctual reaction had been 'no'. A fifteen year old at a concert, at night, by herself? His little girl among thousands of people, half of which male, a large part of them hormonal teenagers? No way.

_Lana jumped next to him, then stumbled and grabbed his arm. He steadied her, and she kept leaning on him. After only the slightest moment of hesitation, he put her arm around her shoulder. She giggled in his ear and her breath tickled. He shivered. Here she was, Lana, the girl starring in many of his fantasies and a number of his stories, pressed against him and he was holding her._

_Never mind that she had smoked pot and probably would have hugged a gorilla._

_From the corner of his eye he saw Alex looking at him, and he turned his head to gloat. Alex scowled. He opened his mouth to say something, but Tom punched his arm and pointed at the other side of the parking lot. Behind them, Chris slowly let himself out of the van, carefully placing his feet on the ground an looking like he'd rather climb back in and hide inside._

_A car approached. Rick stared into the headlights, but couldn't make out what kind of car it was. It was just two bright lights. It stopped about twenty yards away from them and just kept standing there, engine running. Rick shielded his eyes and tried to make out if there was anybody inside – of course there was somebody inside, somebody was driving it, right? _

_Just as he was getting impatient – really, how dramatic did a drug deal have to be – Tom stepped forward. At the same time, the doors of the car opened and four people spilled out. Rick blinked. In the back of his mind, all sorts of alarm bells were going off, and the story he was running in his head took a distinctly more sinister turn. He shook it off though. No need to let his stories get ahead of him._

"_Rocko, my man!" Tom said, stepping closer to the unidentified car. _

_Rick looked at his back. Tom was a tall guy with broad shoulders and short blond hair. For any purpose and means he looked like a college football player, but Rick knew better. Tom was a pizza baker in a small restaurant downtown, working nights and sleeping during the day time. He sometimes called himself the vampire, and they always laughed about that. _

_Tom was the driver. The instigator of mischief. The leader of their pack._

_And, apparently, their drug dealer._

_Suddenly, Rick felt cold. His clothes were still damp and the slight breeze was chilling him outside the van. But it wasn't just a coldness from the physical state he was in; it was a coldness of the soul. He was not supposed to be here, this wasn't his world. _

_Maybe, for once, he should have listened to his mother when she had described Tom as 'a dumb-ass low-life with too much charm and too little education'._

_Lana wrapped her arms around him, and he felt her warmth permeate through his clothing. She had tensed, obviously sensing even in her haze that something was going down, something big, bigger than ever before, maybe even bigger than they could handle._

"Uh," Rick said, looking first at his daughter, then his mother and then back at his daughter again, trying to buy time.

"Please say yes? We've been dying to go, Leanne's got the tickets, there's gonna be four of us, it'll be really safe and we won't do anything stupid and we won't be far away and Leanne's father said that if we could all go he'd drive us there and then pick us up after?"

He blinked. His mother smiled at him, obviously enjoying every moment of this. He remembered similar scenes, with him being the teenager and Martha being the reluctant mother, and he remembered that more often than not she'd said no. He looked at his daughter.

"You promise you won't do anything I would do?" he asked.

His mother raised her eyebrows.

"Of course not daddy, do I ever?" Alexis asked.

"Well... OK then. You can go."

She squealed, jumped up from the couch and rushed to the stairs. "I'm gonna call Leanne immediately!"

He looked at her disappearing figure until the door to her room upstairs slammed. Then he looked at his mother, noticing the smug smile on her face.

"What?" he asked, "What's so funny?"

"She reminds me of you, that's all."

Rick stared at her, at the stairs and then back at her again.

"Are we talking about Alexis?" he asked, "I could have sworn there weren't any other teenagers in the room."

"Of course I was. I remember you asking to go places."

"You never let me."

"That never stopped you."

Shaking his head, he got up. "You know, mother," he said, "I never could figure you out."

Martha smiled serenely. "You're not supposed to."

"_Not good, not good, not good," was the only thing that was running through his mind when he watched Tom talk to the people from the still invisible car. They were big men, two black guys and two white, from what he could see. Hurray for equal representation, he thought. One of the men turned around and walked to the back of the car. A clicking sound indicated he had opened the trunk._

_What happened next was chaos. Even after over twenty years, he still hadn't quite figured out just what had happened. One moment, Tom was talking to one of the guys, waving his arms, the next he was running towards them, still waving his arms but this time in a more panicky way. He was shouting something, too, and Rick turned to look at Alex._

_Alex. The quiet one. The drop out seventeen year old with access to almost anything they might want for a good party. The one who always looked at Rick in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable. The one about whom his mother had said, 'I don't like his eyes'. He had a gun. And he was pointing it at the other car. More specifically, at the people standing next to the car._

_That was when Rick finally moved. He shoved Lana back, and she stumbled backwards into the van. Behind him, his friend Chris let out a girlish squeak and started scrambling into the car as well. Tom was still running towards them, and Alex fired his gun._

_One of the guys standing next to the other car went down. Tom jumped at his car and started opening the door at the passenger side, obviously intending to get in as soon as possible to drive away. More shots rang out._

_Ricks ears were ringing, not from the loud noise of shots being fired – although that didn't help his hearing either – but from sheer shock. His instinct had been right, he shouldn't have been here and now he was in more trouble than he could handle._

_Next to him, Alex sagged against the van. The gun dropped from his hand and he slowly slid down to the ground. Without hesitating, Rick grabbed him and pushed him into the van. Something tugged at his arm, but he ignored it. Screaming at his friends for help – Lana was huddled under the back seat, Chris was just sitting there, apparently waiting for it to be over like it was some bad TV show – he tried to drag Alex with him, with little success. He was on his own._

_Bullets hit the van, miraculously missing him, and he jumped inside and dragged Alex in a surge of power from the adrenaline with him, and then scrambled to the front of the car since Tom hadn't managed to climb behind the wheel yet. When he slithered over the front seat, he saw why. Tom was in the car, but he was just laying there, face down. There was a suspicious dark stain on the back of his denim jacket._

_Rick, his mind still reeling, for a moment didn't know what to do. Then he pushed Tom aside, slid behind the wheel and turned the key. The van instantly came to life, and he hit the gas. It took several tries with the engine roaring but the car not moving before he realized he had to put it in drive first. The van jerked forward. Gasping, he turned the wheel, hit the gas once more and tore out of there. The drug dealers from the car didn't follow. _

_All went quiet._

He stared at the screen of his laptop, fingers lightly touching the keys. There was nothing to it, really, just a light pressure from his fingers would make the words flow out onto the screen. And really, what harm would it do. Just words on a screen. He had but to turn off his computer, and it would all be gone, like it had never existed. Like he had pretended it to never exist for the past twenty-tree years.

"_We can't do that." _

_Rick, arms wrapped around his body, looked unhappily at Lana, who had recovered somewhat. Chris was still sitting in the same spot in the van, his hands on the back of the driver's seat in front of him, staring straight ahead. He hadn't said a word in almost an hour._

"_Well, we're going to have to do _something_," Lana said irritably._

_Rick sighed. "We can't just..." He shuddered and waved his hand at the railroad tracks in the distance and the lights of passing cars on the highway. "We can't just _leave_ them here."_

"_Do you know how much trouble I'll be in when my parents find out?" Lana asked. She looked down on her jeans. "God, I got blood on me."_

_Rick carefully avoided looking at the two dark lumps laying behind the van. They had driven for a while, Rick clutching the wheel so tight he had trouble pealing his fingers off once they had stopped. His brain had started functioning again after a while, and he had realized that he was driving without a license and had _drunk_ two beers. And even though he thought the adrenaline effectively canceled out any intoxication, he was pretty sure a judge would see things differently. This wasn't something his mother would be able to sweet talk him out off. _

"_They're dead." Lana had said from the back. "Alex is dead, Ricky. He just... died." _

_Her voice had sounded dead too. Rick had glanced at Tom, who also remained eerily still. He had taken the first exit, had then randomly followed some secondary roads and when he suddenly couldn't take it any longer he had stopped the car. They had dragged their friends out of the car and put them on the ground._

"_They're both dead," Lana said again, "They won't know. Tom doesn't have any family as far as I know, and Alex..."_

"_Alex has a brother," Rick said numbly._

"_Who won't tell on us," Lana said, "Come on, Ricky, be reasonable. Nobody gets hurt this way, and we can all forget this ever happened."_

_Rick glanced at Chris, but he seemed both deaf and dumb. _

"_Yeah," he said, "But dumping them in the river..."_

_Lana stamped her feet. "_Then_ what do you want to do?"_

_Bury them properly. Say goodbye. Not dump them somewhere, like they were trash. They were people, even if they had been criminals. You don't treat people that way._

"_They were our friends," he said. _

Only the light on his desk was still burning, the rest of the house was dark and quiet. He liked this time of the day, where everybody else was sleeping and he was writing. Nobody would disturb him now, no loving daughter would come to wrap her arms around his neck, no mother to grace him with her slightly overwhelming presence, no attractive detective to drag him away from his stories... although he wouldn't mind the latter. He looked at the words on the screen again, and moved the mouse pointer towards the save button. Then he stopped.

The letters danced before his eyes, words, sentences, forming meaning, forming a story. A true story, nothing made up, nothing polished or idealized or even heroic. Just some teenager fleeing the scene of a crime, teenagers suddenly confronted with reality, with consequences. Finding out that they were not in fact invincible, that they were not immortal. That death could come suddenly, and that life was ugly.

_The apartment was just as he had left it. Quiet. Dark. Cool. He became aware of a soft dripping sound and looked down at this feet, where a small puddle was forming. Slowly, he let his backpack down on the floor and rubbed his face. Then he looked at the clock. Six AM. He stared._

_Had it really been only six hours ago that he had left the apartment with the intention of running off with his friends to a concert? Had he really meant just run away for a few days, leave everybody wondering where he was? Had he really meant to punish his mother like that?_

_Feeling bone tired, he made his way across the apartment and very quietly opened the door to his mother's bedroom. Eyes already used to the darkness, he could just make out the lonely form of his mother under the sheets, as usual sprawled out across the huge king size bed. She was snoring a little. He smiled, closed the door entered the room next to his mother's. Without putting on the light, he changed out of his wet clothes into his pajamas and slipped into his bed._

_Nothing had happened. It was all a bad dream. In the morning, it wouldn't seem so bad. _

_He laid awake for a long time._

He moved his hand and clicked the tiny red cross at the top of the window, closing the document without saving it. His eyes wandered through the room, the dark shapes at the other end of the room, the objects laying on his desk, brightly lit by his desk lamp. Then he opened up a new, pristine white document.

* * *

Detective Nikki Heat carefully stepped around the puddles on the muddy ground. A freight train thundered over the tracks close by, and she watched it pass by on the overpass. The highway's constant sound seemed dampened by the oppressive heat. The sun shining on the drying mud made for an almost unbearable humidity in the air, and even after only ten minutes of walking, her blouse was sticking to her skin in a way she knew would have the uniforms leering at her. She really should have just driven up to the scene instead of following her usual routine of walking the last part to 'take in the scene'.

Right. The scene.

Ignoring the looks of her colleagues who, for the most of them, were used to her way of approaching a crime scene by now, she looked at the scene in front of her.

Two bodies. Young men, boys even, carefully laid out on the ground next to each other. Both of them with their eyes closed and their arms crossed on their chests. She stepped closer, glancing briefly at the blackened form of a burned out van standing about ten yards away. It was completely drenched; the fire department had made quick work of the fire once they had arrived, but still it was completely destroyed. She wrinkled her nose at the stench of burned rubber. No fingerprints there. She turned her attention to the bodies and the medical examiner who knelt next to them.

Two boys. One blond, muscular boy, looking no older than eighteen, the other smaller, brown hair, younger. Both had blood stained clothes, so she suspected they were shot. But not here.

"They were kids," she said, stepping closer. Kneeling down next to Lauren Parry, she inspected they way they were laid out. It was almost as if...

"Somebody took great care of positioning them like this," Lauren said, "Almost like they were paying their respects... like they said goodbye, like they took the time to mourn them."

Nikki sat back on her haunches and put on her gloves while looking at yet another freight train, this one passing slowly. "What have you got?" she asked.

"Two males, in their middle to late teens, both shot with a high caliber gun, can't tell you which yet. The blond one was shot in the back, twice, must have died instantly, the other was shot in the chest. He'll have lived for a little while longer."

Nikki tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "Hmm... one of them was running away... the other one..." She reached out, then looked at Lauren for consent – which she got – and lifted the dark haired boy's right hand. Nothing. She put it back.

"Have them check his hands, see if he fired a gun recently... like just before he died."

A shadow fell over her and she closed her eyes briefly. She didn't have to turn around to know exactly who that was. "Rook."

"I knew it!"

She looked up, annoyed. He was grinning at her. She rolled her eyes, and then asked the question she knew he was dying to hear.

"And what, pray tell, did you know?"

His grin widened. "You and I, we're _connecting_. We're like... a team. We sense each other's presence."

She blinked at him. "Your hair sticks out funny. It's your shadow," she said flatly.

Beside her, she could hear Lauren snort, but she kept her eyes on the reporter who had been the bane of her existence for a six months now. He frowned, and seemed momentarily at a loss for words, which made her unexpectedly happy. She squashed the feeling of triumph though, and instead looked up when yet another freight train passed by.

"They'll have left by train," Rook said.

Nikki sighed and nodded, annoyed that he had managed to voice her thoughts before she could. "Find out what freight trains passed by here last night, approximately between two and four AM," she said, turning to detective Ochoa, "Whoever left them here must gotten away somehow." She nodded at the van. "And see if you can find anything in there... Though I'm not hopeful."

Slowly, she stood up and stared down at the bodies. They both looked... peaceful. Asleep, almost. Then she looked around the deserted piece of land, located next to the highway and the railroad track. The place looked like a dumping place for building materials. Big chunks of concrete, wiring sticking out. Huge concrete pipes, stacked and forgotten. A mesh of wooden poles and barbed wire thrown haphazardly in a corner.

Whoever had left the boys here could have dumped them and be rid of them, and the chance of anybody finding them here would have been remote. Instead, they had torched the van, setting a beacon, and had carefully placed them where they would be found within minutes of arriving at the fire.

It was a statement. A cry for help. An accusation, look at what they did to our friends.

She turned around. "Find out who they were. And more specifically, who their friends were."

* * *

_Author end notes: Actually, I enjoyed writing the 'Nikki Heat' part more than the Castle part. Did some research, read the first few pages of the online novel 'Heat Wave'. Ended it rather abruptly because otherwise it might have evolved into an actual story and I've got too many of those already._


End file.
